29 quotes
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Man is only an extension of the spirit of place.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
The Listener (1978)
It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.
It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
We are children of our landscape. It dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure in which we are responsive to it.
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never,never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course … youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over.
About the pre-WWII days in Kalami on Corfu (1975)